Fauci’s Private Vaccine Concerns Raise Alarm as CDC Study Finds No Increased Miscarriage Risk

Newly released text messages from Anthony Fauci’s government phone show the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director privately telling colleagues in January 2021 that the COVID-19 vaccine’s second dose “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester” — a private admission that lands the same year federal researchers have finally finished the most complete study on the question ever conducted.So, did the government’s own doctors know more than they were telling expectant mothers?Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released the texts this week, part of a phone dump the Department of Health and Human Services turned over on August 5 containing more than 34,000 text messages and 522 voicemails, most identified only by phone number rather than by contact name.The exchange in question ran from January 25 to 26, 2021, between Dr. Fauci, then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Vivek Murthy, President Biden’s nominee for surgeon general at the time and not confirmed by the Senate until that March, both of whom he said agreed it was worth watching.That messaging is now getting a second look, not only from senators but from the government’s own data.A newly completed analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 Vaccine Pregnancy Registry, drawn from 12,097 pregnancies and published this year in the journal Vaccine, found a cumulative risk of miscarriage, formally referred to as a spontaneous abortion, in 10.79 percent among women vaccinated before 20 weeks’ gestation, below the range seen in studies conducted before the vaccines existed.Some medical professionals, however, emphasize that it doesn’t change how they counsel women.“As with any other virus, we know that the virus is more dangerous to mom and baby than the vaccine,” an associate professor of public health sciences at Pennsylvania State University, Casey Pinto, tells The New York Sun. “I would not ask someone to do something I wouldn’t do myself. I was pregnant, had a miscarriage, and went on to have a successful pregnancy during COVID. I got the vaccine every time I needed to.”The public record and the private one, it turns out, tell two very different stories.Private Doubt, Public CertaintyThe senators’ release lays the private exchange against a timeline of public statements those same officials made in the months and years that followed, and the divide between the two is a big part of what has driven the story.A week and a half after the private text, Dr. Fauci told the public the FDA had found “no red flags about that, about pregnant women.” By August 2021, the CDC’s Sascha Ellington said the agency was “not seeing a signal of safety concerns.”Almost two months later, Ms. Walensky told a White House briefing that studies showed the vaccines were safe. By February 2022, Dr. Murthy was telling pregnant women “anytime during your pregnancy is actually fine.”Mr. Johnson’s release also revives a fight over a different, older study, a 2021 New England Journal of Medicine paper on 827 pregnant women that reported a 12.6 percent spontaneous abortion rate.Mr. Johnson argues that because 700 of those women received their vaccine in the third trimester, when miscarriage is no longer possible by definition, the real denominator should be the 127 women vaccinated in the first and second trimesters, 104 of whom lost their pregnancies, putting the rate at 82 percent, a recalculation he attributes to an open letter Dr. James Thorp published in 2022.Critics of that recalculation, including some who otherwise distrust the vaccines, say it introduces its own distortion by ignoring how long each woman was actually followed and at what point in pregnancy she entered the study, the same statistical problem the newly completed CDC registry was explicitly designed to correct.The registry counted each pregnancy starting the week vaccination occurred. Using the complete five-year dataset instead of the partial 2021 sample, researchers found no elevated risk. Mr. Johnson, however, stands by his recalculation of the earlier study. CDC researchers stand by their revised methodology. Neither has backed down.Doctors Divided on the GroundAway from the Senate floor, physicians who treated pregnant patients through the mandate era describe watching the miscarriage-math argument play out in real time.An emergency medicine physician based in Tennessee, Matt Tipton, says the pressure campaign around the vaccine broke with decades of caution the medical field had built since the thalidomide era.Thalidomide was marketed in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a sedative and a remedy for morning sickness, widely prescribed to pregnant women in Europe, Canada and elsewhere before doctors linked it to severe birth defects, including missing or shortened limbs, in an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 infants worldwide.When drugmakers pushed to sell the sedative in the United States, an FDA reviewer, Frances Kelsey, wouldn’t sign off without better safety data. Her refusal kept the drug off American shelves. It didn’t keep the country out of the crisis entirely — an estimated 17 American babies were still affected through unmonitored clinical distribution at the time.The episode led Congress to pass the Kefauver-Harris Amendment in 1962, which for the first time required drugmakers to prove a medication was both safe and effective, including in pregnancy, before it could reach the market. It later shaped the pregnancy categories the FDA still uses to weigh a drug’s risk to a developing fetus.“We put really good standards in place for testing medicines in pregnancy, and then when COVID happened, it was just, ‘It’s fine, it’s safe,’ even though there had never been an mRNA vaccine before,” Dr. Tipton tells the Sun.“I knew pregnant nurses in their first trimester who were told, ‘You’re going to get this, or you can’t work.’ It became: do we lose the house, or do I take an experimental medicine and risk the baby?”Dr. Tipton contends that patients should have had the final say regardless.“It’s my job as a doctor to explain the risks and benefits. The decision should still be the patient’s,” he continues. “A woman with a prior miscarriage, worried about a brand-new vaccine, wanting to wait and mask instead, that’s a reasonable position.”Yet, Dr. Pinto, for her part, points to access rather than fear as a bigger driver of lower uptake among pregnant women.“Most women of childbearing age don’t see a primary care doctor annually,” she says. “If the OB-GYN doesn’t have the vaccine, and the patient doesn’t routinely see a primary care doctor, it’s just one more stop to get a vaccine that they might not have time to make.”A Bioethicist on the Politics of TimingNot everyone sees the new registry data as complicating the picture, or the timing of its release as accidental. A professor emeritus and past head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health, Dr. Arthur Caplan, says the underlying science has not budged in years.“There’s a ton of these studies that have been done involving millions of births from overseas studies,” Dr. Caplan tells the Sun, pointing to research out of Yale around 2022 and an NIH-linked study he referred to as Presto. “They all show the same thing again and again. No elevated risk of miscarriage.” He says the general miscarriage rate runs around 9 percent regardless of vaccination status and, if anything, “looks a little bit protective to get” the shot.Dr. Caplan is skeptical that the fresh scrutiny is really about the data at all.“Sometimes it gets quieter about it. Sometimes it gets noisier, depending on the way the political winds are blowing,” he explains, noting that he sees the current HHS secretary as unlikely to be swayed by any of it. “RFK Jr. and his ignoramus friends will continue to undermine what the evidence shows, which has been for a long time that it’s much better when you’re pregnant to get a COVID vaccine than it is to get COVID.”His comment lands on a day when President Trump signed a new executive order directing federal agencies to realign childhood vaccine recommendations. This order reportedly came shortly after Sens. Johnson and Paul released the Fauci texts.“The American people deserve childhood vaccine recommendations that are made by qualified experts, through an established, transparent process and based on the best available scientific evidence,” he stresses. “Today’s executive order undermines all three of these fundamental standards.”The Case for Continued VaccinationOne physician contacted by the Sun says the completed registry study fits neatly alongside that larger body of evidence.“There have now been over a hundred studies using different populations and analytical methods that show a benefit to women, including reducing infections, hospitalizations, and adverse outcomes, such as miscarriage,” a physician and epidemiologist, Jay Varma, tells the Sun. “This is why the major professional societies for pregnant women, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine, both recommend that women receive mRNA COVID-19 vaccines during any trimester of their pregnancy.”The CDC’s own guidance, however, has shifted. Its current 2025 to 2026 recommendations no longer call on pregnant women specifically to get vaccinated. COVID-19 vaccination now falls under a broader “individual decision-making” framework the agency applies to everyone six months and older. Pregnancy is still listed as a condition tied to higher risk of severe illness, but that no longer translates into a standing recommendation.The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists broke from that approach in June, publishing its own maternal immunization schedule that continues to recommend the vaccine for all pregnant patients, a divergence the group has attributed to its own review of the safety and efficacy data, even as the newly released Fauci texts confirm health officials privately debated the very risk they were publicly downplaying back in 2021.Yet, for the likes of Dr. Tipton, that gap between private doubt and public certainty is the real story, regardless of whose miscarriage math turns out to hold up.“How many mistakes were made? I’m fine with honest mistakes,” he observes. “But we actually knew about potential early problems, and it wasn’t shared. That’s not something I’m ready to move past.”Dr. Caplan, meanwhile, urges pregnant women to consult physicians over politicians.“It’s better to get the shot than the disease,” he underscores.

Fauci’s Private Vaccine Concerns Raise Alarm as CDC Study Finds No Increased Miscarriage Risk

Fauci’s Private Vaccine Concerns Raise Alarm as CDC Study Finds No Increased Miscarriage Risk

More from the New York Sun

Florida Gerrymander Appears To Have Been a Dud

‘Rope’ Gets a Taut Twist

How JFK, the Marilyn Monroe of Politics, Won Over Eleanor Roosevelt

The Unravelling of the Fashion Designer

New York Times Ridiculed Over Obvious Fake Name on ‘Jewish Voters’ for El-Sayed Story

Ballot Machine Breakdowns in Key House Battlegrounds Spark Confusion, Doubt About Election Integrity

The Socialist Democrats Will Spend Plenty If They Win, but President Trump Will Veto All of It

Israel’s Next Liberation

More from the New York Sun

Florida Gerrymander Appears To Have Been a Dud

‘Rope’ Gets a Taut Twist

How JFK, the Marilyn Monroe of Politics, Won Over Eleanor Roosevelt

The Unravelling of the Fashion Designer

New York Times Ridiculed Over Obvious Fake Name on ‘Jewish Voters’ for El-Sayed Story

Ballot Machine Breakdowns in Key House Battlegrounds Spark Confusion, Doubt About Election Integrity

The Socialist Democrats Will Spend Plenty If They Win, but President Trump Will Veto All of It

Israel’s Next Liberation